Ok, I cut a lot of this post out, but in general to answer the questions, the class I took was 3 years ago. The school was using the Sprint brand of chemicals, which wasn't too bad. Its when I tried developing at home that the grain was really bad. I was using Arista developer (just the regular stuff). I still have a couple rolls in the freezer and intend to try it again with some HC-110, and see what happens.